American school officials almost invariably compare local and national achievement through one of the following norm-referenced tests: (1) the California Achievement Test; (2) the Stanford Achievement Test; (3) the Metropolitan Achievement Test; (4) the Science Research Associates Test; (5) the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills; and (6) the Iowa…

The 1979-80 South Carolina Statewide Testing Program assessed the achievement of students in public school grades 3, 6, and 11. Results were used to facilitate the decision-making process of educators at the state, district, and school levels. The Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS) were used to measure achievement in the basic skill areas…

The Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS) was administered to pupils in Grades 2 through 7, 9 and 11 during the 1979-80 school year as part of the Corvallis School District's testing program. Results of the CTBS, herein expressed as mean (average) percentile rank scores from each of the grades tested, are compared with those of prior years.…

Higher elementary student scores on standardized tests do not mean educational improvement. Scores can be affected by teaching "to" the test, coaching on test taking, and skewed norms. Test scores have been declining at the secondary level. Included is a discussion of secondary tests. (MD)

This study extended the exploration of the development of word identification speed to younger skilled and less skilled readers. It focused on the attainment of unitized speeds to determine when the final phase in reading development (the speed of processing) is reached for familiar words during the early years. (Author/PN)

Describes a system employed by a middle school to improve performance scores on the Comprehensive Testing of Basic Skills (CTBS), through aggressive attitude changes, to ensure fiscal and other benefits. Notes characteristics of the approach, including realistic goals, student involvement, student responsibility, community involvement, student…

The underlying theme of the 1979-80 Hartford Public Schools Group test results was maintenance of the status quo. There were both gains and declines in city-wide averages: individual subtest gains in some cases, put Hartford at or above the national norm (math computation in grades 2, 3, and 4), while the reading comprehension averages in grades 7…

Item bias, when present in a multiple-choice test, can be detected by appropriate analyses of the persons x items scoring matrix. Five related schemes for the statistical analysis of bias were applied to a widely used, primary skills multiple-choice test which was administered in either its English- or Spanish-language version at each of the two…

Test scores for fall and spring administrations for two consecutive years for Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Title I students in the Tucson Unified School District are presented and compared. The students were given out-of-level tests: the 138 seventh-grade students and 106 eighth-grade students were given Level 2 of the…

Fourth, seventh, and ninth grade students in Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Title I programs were tested with the reading comprehension subtests of the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, at each of two levels: on-level for each respective grade, and an easier out-of-level form. Approximately half of these students were found to be…

The reading portion of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) was equated to the reading comprehension subtest of the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS) using the Rasch Model. Both tests were administered to 366 low achieving fourth grade students. MEAP was treated as both a 95-item test and a 19-item (number of objectives…

The Anchor Test Study provides a method for translating a pupil's score on any one of eight widely used standardized reading tests for Grades 4, 5, and 6 to a corresponding score on any of the other seven tests, as well as furnishing new nationally representative norms for each of the eight tests. In addition, the Study presents new estimates of…

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test Revised (PPVT-R) and the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills (CTBS) (reading, mathematics, and language subtests) were administered to 61 elementary school students in semi-rural Louisiana. Moderate positive correlations were found between PPVT-R scores and all CTBS subtests except mathematics computation. (GDC)

The Bayesian approach to setting passing scores, as proposed by Swaminathan, Hambleton, and Algina, is compared with the empirical Bayes approach to the same problem that is derived from Huynh's decision-theoretic framework. Comparisons are based on simulated data which follow an approximate beta-binomial distribution and on real test results from…

Each year, through its system-wide testing program, the Dallas Independent School District collects and reports assessment data on the achievement of its pupils. The data are summarized in a variety of ways in different reports to meet the needs of a particular audience. The three reports in this year's series were produced by computer, using a…